Tag Archives: IceCube

In May 2013, scientists presented a preliminary analysis of 28 high-energy events captured by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a strange telescope entombed deep in Antarctic ice. Two of these events – dubbed Bert and Ernie – had an energy above 1 PeV. (I wrote about these events in an earlier post.) The other 26 events had an energy in excess of 30 TeV. The initial analysis suggested that these 28 events were likely to be from extraterrestrial sources. A more detailed analysis, published today in the journal Science, suggests that only about 11 of the 28 events are likely to have been caused by atmospheric muons or neutrinos. This means that, at a 4? level of certainty, IceCube has detected high-energy neutrinos from outside the Solar System. A 4? result is not quite at the 5? level that is usually said to constitute a discovery, but it is highly suggestive: there is only one chance in 15000 that all those detections were of purely atmospheric events.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory consists of dozens of photomultiplier tubes attached to 86 cables, each of which are up to 2.5 km long and buried deep in Antarctic ice. The photomultipliers detect the Cerenkov radiation from fast-moving secondary particles created when neutrinos strike nuclei in the ice. The structure here is just the tip of the observatory! (Credit: IceCube Collaboration)

The exciting thing, I believe, is that the IceCube team now know how and where to look for high-energy neutrinos. They’ll find more astrophysical neutrinos, for sure, and the neutrino sky suddenly looks much more interesting. For many years, the only extraterrestrial neutrinos that astronomers had detected were those from the Sun and a few from SN1987A. IceCube has thus broken new ground.

The IceCube discovery has caused many commentators to hail a new type of astronomy: neutrino astronomy. Well, I don’t think we are quite there yet. The problem is that we don’t know where Bert, Ernie or the other neutrinos originated. To do neutrino astronomy one needs to be able to correlate neutrinos with specific astrophysical objects; the IceCube measurements lacked the angular resolution to do this. But that, too, will come. And new neutrino telescopes, such as the KM3NeT facility that is being constructed in the Mediterranean, will help.

We can’t do neutrino astronomy just yet, but it won’t be long before we’re studying the universe from an entirely new vantage point. And then, for the first time, astronomers will be able to study the distant universe using something other than electromagnetic radiation. IceCube is opening its eyes.

At the time New Eyes on the Universe was published, the only confirmed sources extraterrestrial neutrinos were the Sun and SN1987A. The view of the sky afforded by neutrino telescopes was rather dull.

That view of the neutrino sky is beginning to change. The IceCube SouthPole Neutrino Observatory – a “telescope” consisting of particle detectors buried in one cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice – has detected 28 neutrinos with an energy in excess of 30 TeV (a teraelectronvolt is 1012 eV). Two of these neutrinos, dubbed Bert and Ernie, had energies in excess of 1 PeV (that’s 1015 eV) – far in excess of energies available at the Large Hadron Collider.

An artist’s impression of the array of optical sensors, buried in Antarctic ice, that form the IceCube telescope. If a high-energy neutrino interacts with an oxygen atom in the ice, a charged particle can be produced that will be moving through the ice faster than light itself can travel through the ice. A cone of Cerenkov radiation, with its characteristic blue hue, will be produced – and it’s this radiation that the sensors detect. (Credit: IceCube Collaboration/NSF)

It’s possible that Bert and Ernie were produced by high-energy cosmic rays smashing into Earth’s atmosphere, but an extraterrestrial origin for these neutrinos does seem more likely than not. And If IceCube has indeed detected high-energy neutrinos from the depths of space the question becomes: what was their source? That’s where things get interesting. If they came from some violent astrophysical source then astronomers have a telescope that lets us study them. Or perhaps they came from the decay of dark matter particles – a suggestion made in a recent preprint by Arman Esmaili and Pasquale Serpico (Are IceCube neutrinos unveiling PeV-scale decaying dark matter?). Whatever the source of Bert and Ernie turns out to be, it seems certain that IceCube truly is giving us some new eyes through which to view the universe.

It’s one of the most long-lasting questions in astrophysics: what’s the source of those really high-energy cosmic rays that sometimes hit Earth? What cosmic gun could possibly shoot such high-energy bullets towards us?

There are two obvious candidates: active galactic nuclei and gamma ray bursts.

There are seem to be two types of progenitors for gamma ray bursts, but the most luminous events probably come from the collapse of very massive, rapidly rotating stars. Models of such collapse events suggest that the fireball should, alongside the generation of extremely energetic gamma rays, generate high-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos. And scientists now have a detector that can hunt for neutrinos from gamma ray bursts: IceCube.

I don’t propose to discuss IceCube in detail in this post. I’ll surely do that in later posts, and you could always read the relevant chapter in New Eyes on the Universe. The exciting news yesterday is that IceCube has been used to look for neutrinos from 300 gamma ray bursts detected by the Swift and Fermi space telescopes. Neutrinos are of course notoriously difficult to spot, but IceCube should have seen several neutrinos from these exceptionally luminous events. It saw nothing.

This negative result suggests that our models of particle production in the fireball of a gamma ray burst might need some major tweaking – and perhaps that high-energy cosmic rays don’t come from burst after all. Perhaps active galactic nuclei are the guns that fire those cosmic ray bullets at us.